Because the web is built on links, how we style our links (i.e, anchors, or <a> tags) should always be an important part of a site’s overall design, branding, and feel.

I’ve seen so many variations on the link style/color and hover style/color combination, that I thought it would be interesting to list as many of them here as possible. Some of these will be quite common and humdrum, while others may be ugly and impractical. I tried to stay away from really bizarre animated stuff, but instead chose to stick to those that you might actually see on a web page.

The vertical-align property is one of those features of CSS that sounds pretty self-explanatory, but can cause problems for CSS beginners. I think even many CSS veterans have had problems figuring this one out at times.

One of the wishlist items a few people mentioned was “CSS blend modes” with a use case of tinting an image on hover (or tinting it statically, then removing the tint on hover or by some other interaction). My immediate thought was: That should be simple enough, shouldn’t it?

Maybe there’s a technical term that I’m not aware of for this type of centered, line-splitting heading. Whatever it’s called, I’ve used it in the new design of the footer on this site, where I’ve divided the footer into sections with headers that overlay a horizontal line.

I wanted to try to do this as efficiently as possible, and without images. I came up with three solutions with pure CSS and one that uses jQuery.

If you haven’t yet used CSS3 transitions extensively, here’s something you may not have picked up on.

As I’ve outlined before, transitions can be triggered in a number of ways, and even via JavaScript. The reason for this is because the actual transition is not dependent on any particular event. Although it is the event that triggers the transition, the transition itself is completely separate from the event (as it should be).

Because of this, you’ll notice a slightly quirky behaviour if you place the transition on the part of your CSS that triggers the event.

Earlier this month, Chris Coyier posted an article discussing a way to deal with the empty elements that are often needed when doing CSS3 animation.

Chris’s solution is interesting. He basically suggests (and I’m paraphrasing here) that we can give the empty elements semantic value by adding some text in each one to describe what each animated element does, or what mood it conveys. Then, the text in those empty elements can be moved off the page with CSS.

Some people got in a tizzy over the potential SEO penalties that could arise (which I kindly pointed out is probably not an issue) while others seemed to have a problem with Chris’s use of the word “semantic”.

You’ve probably used CSS’s border property often, and in almost all cases you’ve probably set the border-style value to “solid”, which looks exactly the same in every browser.

We all know there are other values for border-style, but it’s likely you’ve never used any of them. You may have used a value of “dashed” or “dotted”, but probably not too often.

I thought it would be interesting to screen capture how all the different browsers display all the different values for border-style. In addition to the screen shots, I’ve provided some observations and I’ve summarized how the different values are supposed to look (according to the specification).

At the beginning of this month I wrote a post accompanied by five demo pages that showed that CSS3 transitions could be triggered with a number of different events/states in CSS.

That alone should help you see how these types of simple animations work. But let’s take this a bit further.

CSS pseudo-classes and media queries (which I used in that other post to trigger the transitions) represent certain states for certain elements. These states occur after specific events on the page. So naturally, CSS3 transitions can also be fired using any JavaScript event. Let’s try a simple click event that toggles a class name.